From 10 October 2009 to 17 January 2010, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London hosted ‘Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts’. Two days before the exhibition was scheduled to close, there were long queues of keen visitors still buying tickets, snaking round the main rotunda of the museum. Londoners had braved unusually cold temperatures and the vestiges of a winter storm, which had laid the city (and much of Britain) low. Dense crowds elbowed their way through the multiple display rooms, transfixed by jewelled sarpeches or golden silk saris.

The enthusiasm of these museum goers, many of who were middle-aged or older Britons, was testament to nostalgia for the Raj in a millennial present. It also reflected a continued fascination for the history of the Indian princes, who the exhibition curators described as the most resplendent ‘jewels’ in that jewel dearly prized in Britain's imperial crown: India. Indigenous rulers – dubbed, and demoted, by the British to the status of ‘princes’ – had represented the height of oriental luxury and the mystery of Eastern exoticism, with their ornate costumes, headdresses, palaces and court rituals, ceremonies and festivities, from the first moment the East India Company landed on subcontinental shores during the seventeenth century.

In many ways, the Victoria and Albert Museum was a prime spot for such an imperial display, as it was situated within walking distance of such ‘imperial spectacles’ as the former Great Exhibition of 1851, the 1886 Indian and Colonial Exhibition and the former Imperial Institute.